I have been contacted by several newsagents over the last two days who have found it particularly difficult to cancel direct debit arrangements for their now useless Bill Express equipment. In each case their bank, the ANZ, has refused to act on their written instructions. My understanding is that this is a breach of the Australian Bankers’ Association Code of Banking Practice. It will be interesting to see whether a formal complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service can resolve the disputes.
To balance this I would note that several other newsagents have been refunded amounts taken by their bank after they canceled their direct debit arrangements.
Can they stop you cancelling the account in which it is taken and opening a new one.
I bank with ANZ and will not be happy with them at all if they are doing that. It also conflicts with their decision to send out all of the eftpos terminals after the collapse of BE. I also noticed with the paperwork that came with the terminals that dates went back to about April.
They obviously saw it coming and didn’t warn us?
We had no problem with ANZ when we cancelled our direct debit. Must have been the nice person we talked to at our branch!!
We were intitially told by the ANZ bank that they could not stop the deduction and we would have to approach Mobius to withdraw the authority. After a heated argument they reluctantly placed a stop on the DD. However it was still deducted at the end of July. We went higher up in the bank and had the deduction reversed and associated fees refunded. We are now checking our account daily and if any other deductions slip through we will close our account.
We had no difficulty cancelling the direct debit with our ANZ a/c in Jun08.
Prob bcos we went to a good customer service person that day who was referred to us earlier by another newsagent. Earlier enquiries to that branch manager was not positive either.
But we took extra precaution in closing down that bank account the next day.
We had already set up a new bank a/c 2 mths earlier and transferred everything over except for BillExp and Dialtime.
I am not sure however about trying to recoup back the 2 prior payments in Apr and May08 though, ie the circumstances of the validity of the changeover in the direct debit authority.
All we had was a letter from TBI about changeover to Perpetual but then the debit description came out as CHP.
Does anyone know whether they are the same company? If not, then there could be grounds going back to the bank to get refunds, isn’t it?
helen
Our bank did a trace on CHP and it came back as being Perpetual Nominees – we are still going to try to have the Apr and May payments refunded on the basis that we never signed a new direct debit authority with that organisation..will let you know if we get them back.
Thanks, Liz.
If you could let me know how you go.
Don’t wait for the ANF to help on this. There is a feeling inside that we should not have changed their position last week. Staff don’t know what advice to provide.